Chapter 10

A considerable period of inaction followed among all concerned.

Nothing tended to dissipate the obscurity which veiled the life of
the Baron. The position he occupied in the minds of the country-folk
around was one which combined the mysteriousness of a legendary
character with the unobtrusive deeds of a modern gentleman. To this
day whoever takes the trouble to go down to Silverthorn in Lower
Wessex and make inquiries will find existing there almost a
superstitious feeling for the moody melancholy stranger who resided
in the Lodge some forty years ago.

Whence he came, whither he was going, were alike unknown. It was
said that his mother had been an English lady of noble family who had
married a foreigner not unheard of in circles where men pile up 'the
cankered heaps of strange-achieved gold'--that he had been born and
educated in England, taken abroad, and so on. But the facts of a
life in such cases are of little account beside the aspect of a life;
and hence, though doubtless the years of his existence contained
their share of trite and homely circumstance, the curtain which
masked all this was never lifted to gratify such a theatre of
spectators as those at Silverthorn. Therein lay his charm. His life
was a vignette, of which the central strokes only were drawn with any
distinctness, the environment shading away to a blank.

He might have been said to resemble that solitary bird the heron.
The still, lonely stream was his frequent haunt: on its banks he
would stand for hours with his rod, looking into the water, beholding
the tawny inhabitants with the eye of a philosopher, and seeming to
say, 'Bite or don't bite--it's all the same to me.' He was often
mistaken for a ghost by children; and for a pollard willow by men,
when, on their way home in the dusk, they saw him motionless by some
rushy bank, unobservant of the decline of day.

Why did he come to fish near Silverthorn? That was never explained.
As far as was known he had no relatives near; the fishing there was
not exceptionally good; the society thereabout was decidedly meagre.
That he had committed some folly or hasty act, that he had been
wrongfully accused of some crime, thus rendering his seclusion from
the world desirable for a while, squared very well with his frequent
melancholy. But such as he was there he lived, well supplied with
fishing-tackle, and tenant of a furnished house, just suited to the
requirements of such an eccentric being as he.

Margery's father, having privately ascertained that she was living
with her grandmother, and getting into no harm, refrained from
communicating with her, in the hope of seeing her contrite at his
door. It had, of course, become known about Silverthorn that at the